R.U.R.

Karel Capek

Mar 2014 · Courier Corporation

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One of the classics of twentieth-century theater, this brilliantly conceived and exquisitely executed play by Czech playwright Karel Čapek (1890–1938) looks to a future in which all workers are automatons, or "robots" — a word this play made a permanent part of the language. The robots revolt when their manufacturing formula is changed to make them more irritable and to give them the human ability to hate, and the resulting catastrophe makes for a powerful and deeply moving theatrical experience.
"It is murderous social satire, done in terms of the most hair-raising melodrama," wrote Alexander Woolcott in his 1922 review of the first U.S. performance of this universally admired play. Heywood Broun wrote, "Čapek is potentially one of the great men in the modern drama. He has devised a scene at the end of the third act as awesome as anything we have ever seen in the theatre." This is the scene in which one of the last remaining humans, knowing himself and his species to be doomed, muses: "It was a great thing to be a man. There was something immense about it."

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Karel Capek is best known abroad for his plays, but at home he is also revered as an accomplished novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and writer of political articles. His bitingly satirical novel The War with the Newts (1936) reveals his understanding of the possible consequences of scientific advance. The novel Krakatit (1924), about an explosive that could destroy the world, foreshadows the feared potential of a nuclear disaster. In his numerous short stories he depicts the problems of modern life and common people in a humorous and whimsically philosophical fashion. The plays of Karel Capek presage the Theater of the Absurd. R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) (1921) was a satire on the machine age. He created the word robot from the Czech noun robota, meaning "work" for the human-made automatons who in that play took over the world, leaving only one human being alive. The Insect Comedy (1921), whose characters are insects, is an ironic fantasy on human weakness. The Makropoulos Secret (1923), later used as the basis for Leos Janacek's opera, was an experimental piece that questioned whether immortality is really desirable. All the plays have been produced successfully in New York. Most deal satirically with the modern machine age or with war. Underlying all his work, though, is a faith in humanity, truth, justice, and democracy, which has made him one of the most beloved of all Czech writers.